ThadBlog

Mike Kazaleh broke this one down for me over a year ago, and I haven’t gotten around to using it until now.

“Scaredy Cat” is one of the many perfect cartoons Chuck Jones’ unit turned out in the late 1940s and early 1950s, so there isn’t much that can be said for it that hasn’t been said already. For me, the best of these cartoons are the best cartoons, period.

Classes are really time-absorbing so this will be the last breakdown for quite a while. Happy Halloween!

There’s a large book in the school library, Animation Art: The Early Years, by Jeff Lotman and Jonathan Smith, consisting of classic animation art. Much of it is devoted to cels of the Disney variety (and it’s certainly not worth the price on Amazon), but here’s a few Warner pieces I found interesting.

Hawley Pratt layout from “Racketeer Rabbit”

Hawley Pratt layout from “Stooge for a Mouse”

Bob McKimson scene from “What’s Cookin’ Doc?”

Bob McKimson scene from “Falling Hare”

Manny Gould scene from “Hare Ribbin’”

Original title art

Seeing as I am tired of having endless comments from a guy with a woodpecker fetish, anonymous comments are disallowed. If you need help registering for blogger to leave comments, let me know. Thanks.

Please visit Bob Jaques’ new blog devoted to identifying the styles of various Popeye animators. Bob is an incredible animator in his own right and is responsible for the best animation in the first two seasons of The Ren & Stimpy Show (”Stimpy’s Invention”, “Sven Hoek”).

The Foghorn Leghorn shorts always had the funniest animated beatings, so here’s a whole cartoon built around them. Great Scribner animation in this one.

Here’s an underrated classic I recently took a look at, Friz Freleng’s “Foxy by Proxy” (1952). Technically, it’s a ‘patchwork film’, borrowing the premise (and entire opening!) of Tex Avery’s “Of Fox and Hounds”. But it has a lot of great elements of its own, such as the funniest pack of dogs ever animated (by Art Davis), and a great take on the Avery gag of Bugs ‘turning-the-log-off-a-cliff’. Virgil Ross does a great job with subtlety here with Lenny (Stan Freberg) being so stupid that he thinks his ‘little friend’ has gone away because Bugs has the headpiece on backwards. Ross also animated the ending with Bugs getting one-upped.

There’s a lengthy piece here that definitely isn’t animated by one of the Freleng regulars, of Bugs trying to get the dogs off his trail. It’s beautifully animated and perfectly drawn… Any suspects? [Edit: Mike Kazaleh writes in that he thinks John Carey may have animated it.]